Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Consumers are willing to sacrifice performance for perceived social status from green products, says the study Going Green to Be Seen: Status, Reputation, and Conspicuous Conservation, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “Shoppers choose hybrid cars, “green”…
How cities became our greatest design challenge yet. Justin McGuirk, the editor of icon, the UK’s leading architecture & design magazine, argues in The Guardian that, amid unprecedented levels of urbanisation, designers must be trusted to fashion cities that not…
Petz Scholtus reports in TreeHugger on presentations by Alastair Fuad-Luke, Gui Bonsiepe and Alfred Astort during the recent 1st International Congress of Design and Innovation of Catalonia (CIDIC) at the ESDi School of Design in Spain. “Designers should get away…
Our personal details are used everywhere. And it’s more easy to share, mine and exploit them than ever before. This new report by the UK think tank Demos is an up-close and personal investigation into how people feel about the…
Africa Calling: Can Mobile Phones Make a Miracle? is the title of a long article by Jenny C. Aker (Assistant Professor, The Fletcher School) and Isaac M. Mbiti (Assistant Professor, SMU), published in the March/April 2010 edition of the Boston…
Are some behaviours more contagious than others? This is the question that Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler address in their book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. From a Science + Religion…
In his blog, Dan Lockton, a Ph.D. researcher at Brunel University (UK), describes eleven behavioural change patterns “drawn from games or modelled on more playful forms of influencing behaviour.” “My main interest here is to extract the design techniques as…
If the 20th century was the era of the global institution–the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the multinational corporation—then the 21st century will be the era of the participatory system, argues Participle‘s Hillary Cottam in the Winter 2010 (Vol.XXXI.…
Happiness itself is a commons to which everyone should have equal access. Jay Walljasper, co-editor of OnTheCommons.org, reflects on this statement by Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotà, Colombia, in Shareables. A worthwile read whenever you need some arguments against…
When rational appeals fall short, environmentalists enlist social and economic incentives–and even neuroscience–to get the public in on national efforts to combat climate change. Scientific American reports. Energy efficiency seems to make rational economic sense—the less energy used, the more…
Merging complex systems science and ecology, resilience scientists have broken new ground on understanding—and preserving—natural ecosystems. Now, as more and more people move into urban hubs, they are bringing this novel science to the city. “Resilience theory, first introduced by…
In relentless pursuit of ‘connecting,’ we miss out on each other The Seattle Times argues that while communication and gaming gadgets have convenienced and connected us in ways never before possible, they may also be profoundly hurting our ability to…
“We’ve been looking at privacy and publicity as a black-or-white attribute for content, when really it’s defined by context and the implications of what we’ve chosen to share.” This is the essence of Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd‘s keynote speech at…
The Socio-Digital Systems (SDS) group of Microsoft Research aims to use an understanding of human values to help to change the technological landscape in the 21st century. “Beyond making us all more productive and efficient, we ask how we can…
New insights from science and behaviour change could lead to significantly improved outcomes, and at a lower cost, than the way many conventional policy tools are used, argues the UK Government. MINDSPACE: Influencing behaviour through public policy was a joint…
Behavioral economics is used to examine how consumers make decisions about everything from their life savings to which brands of jam they select in a supermarket. Hunt Allcott, a behavioral economist with a two-year appointment as the Energy and Society…
Steve Portigal, Julie Norvaisas and Dan Soltzberg of Portigal Consulting were invited by Core77 to discuss what makes their clocks tick: the analogue human and the digital machine. Steve Portigal: “I feel like there’s this tension that goes on in…
The Economist questions whether it is really helpful to talk about a new generation of “digital natives†who have grown up with the internet. “Writing in the British Journal of Education Technology in 2008, a group of academics led by…
Brook Lyndhurst, an independent research and strategy consultancy, based in London, UK, works on projects that are concerned with understanding, promoting and delivering sustainable development. A couple of their research reports are highly recommended reading: The diffusion of environmental behaviours:…